THE SEARCH FOR MH370
The Rock radio DJS Thane Kirby and Duncan Heyde say their search for MH370 is not a stunt. James Croot reports.
The Rock Drive Show hosts insist their upcoming trip to search for MH370 is not a stunt.
Thane Kirby and Duncan Heyde say they’re not borrowing stablemates Jono and Ben’s inflatable castle or ducks for this month’s trip to Mauritius and will be fully focused on attempting to do their part to solve one of the biggest mysteries in aviation history.
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 went missing in the early hours of March 8, 2014, en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
It’s a puzzle that has engrossed Kirby from day one. He’s run a regular Plane Watch segment, firstly at George FM and now The Rock, updating listeners on any news about the search, long after most other media outlets moved onto other stories.
‘‘How can you lose a big plane like that with all the technology we’ve got now?’’ Kirby says of the reason for his continued interest.
‘‘Then, there’s the conspiracy theorists. Is this to do with the Bermuda Triangle? Some voodoo going on? Or did a country knock it out of the air with a missile? There are a lot of theories.’’
For his part, Heyde isn’t sure that anything sinister has gone on but he reckons ‘‘it’s worth having a couple of your old-mate, battler Kiwis going to check it out’’.
But why an island off the coast of Africa, when virtually everyone else has been looking much further east? Apart from the fact that a small amount of debris believed to be from the craft was found on nearby Reunion Island, it was the research of one Australian that Kirby was keen to check out and try to verify.
‘‘Peter Mcmahon’s pastime and hobby is looking for new volcanoes,’’ Heyde says.
‘‘He had subscriptions which allowed him to access high-res images from Google Maps and Nasa and he’d scour the ocean looking for them. Soon after the plane disappeared, he stumbled across these two co-ordinates which had what looked like the outline of a plane on them.
‘‘A few people have discredited him, [MH370 investigators have said the pictures he is claiming as evidence were taken in 2009] but Thane and I thought ‘What if he’s right and nobody’s checked?’
‘‘In all those [Hollywood] disaster movies, when a meteorite or a comet is about to hit the Earth, or we’re going to have the big freeze, or there’s a tidal wave coming, there’s always that one crazy guy who says, ‘I’ve got to see the President – this is happening’. And they go, ‘whatever, guy, we’ve got the world’s best scientists on this’. But this is just one of those things where you go, ‘how do we really know until we go and find out?’ ’’
It’s because ‘‘no one has gone out there and lifted the rock’’ that Kirby feels he needs to take a look for himself. ‘‘I could be right . . . I could be wrong.’’
‘‘At the end of the day, we want to find a plane,’’ Heyde says. ‘‘But, if we don’t find a plane, at least we can offer to the families of the victims that another part of the ocean has been searched. They can cross that off.’’
While they’ve tried unsuccessfully to get the green light from the Malaysian authorities, partly because of a recent change in regime (although the government has encouraged private searches in the past), they are going with the blessing of Paul Weeks’ family, one of two New Zealand citizens on board the ill-fated flight.
‘‘We’ve been regularly chatting to Charlotte Weeks, his niece,’’ confirms Heyde.
‘‘She was gutted when the initial search ended, but she was happy to know that we’re going and it’s great to have her blessing.’’
A sometimes controversial pair (Kirby has been the subject of a number of Broadcasting Standards Authority complaints), their $35,000 week-long trip has only been made possible thanks to a seven-day crowdfunding campaign they conducted in March. More than 400 Rock listeners donated to the cause.
Heyde says the crowdfunding approach came about after their station manager declined to fund the trip. He thinks Rock listeners wanted to donate because like them ‘‘everyone wants answers, everyone wants closure for the families’’.
Kirby agrees, adding that ‘‘no one forced them to donate money – they did it because they were interested. Some want an outcome, some just want to know if we’re right or not. No one wanted to do nothing.’’
When asked if they feel an obligation to those who have donated money, Heyde says they absolutely did ‘‘100 per cent’’, adding that they will share any collateral ‘‘spoils’’ they find while searching. And this is definitely not a holiday for the pair.
‘‘It’s going to be brutal. We are only on the ground for three days and 24 of those hours are going to be out on the water. It’s also going to take us between 28 and 52 hours, depending on how lucky we are with the layovers, just to get there.’’
Leaving Christchurch tomorrow after watching the Warriors plays the Sea Eagles , Kirby and Heyde, who recently took out the 2018 Radio Award for Best Network Music Non-breakfast Team, will fly to Mauritius via Auckland, Sydney and Dubai. They will be joined on the journey by a search and rescue expert, $150,000 worth of camera gear, and will be met in Mauritius by an announcer from a local radio station Radio 1, who will be their translator.
‘‘They are all French-speaking over there, which myself and Thane are not so flash at,’’ admits Heyde.
‘‘He’s a bit of a character, he’s got a thick French accent, so I reckon he’s the guy on the ground for us with the local knowledge who will help us out.’’
Bird and Swine Flu jabs are needed to obtain medical insurance for the pair and Heyde says he’s
‘‘It’s worth having a couple of your old-mate, battler Kiwis going to check it out.’’ Thane Kirby
been taking Kirby out fishing for the past few months to improve his co-host’s ‘‘sea legs’’.
‘‘I’m out on the water fishing for snapper all the time, but Thane’s caught one big fish and now he reckons he’s ‘clocked’ fishing.’’
What about Somali pirates? ‘‘We’ve definitely investigated that,’’ says Heyde. ‘‘I think Mediaworks would like to know there aren’t any, but we’re definitely going to be in a part of the world where they operate – around the Horn of Africa. But they prefer deeper water where the cargo ships operate.’’
He says their search expert has told them they will know ‘‘reasonably quickly’’ if they are going to find anything in their proposed search area. ‘‘It’s only around 50 to 100m deep where we are going, which is a little easier compared to what [US company] Ocean Infinity’s official search boat has been looking at – areas that are apparently 2.8km deep.
‘‘We’ll have a four-hour window on each tide where we can have our camera gear on the bottom and outside of that we’ll conduct a 1km grid search using sonar.’’
The pair plan to spend one day at both of Mcmahon’s suggested co-ordinates and are aiming to broadcast their show (it will be breakfast time on the island) as normal, ‘‘probably half the time from our Mauritius hotel and half on the boat while we are chugging out to the co-ordinates’’, says Heyde.
A videographer will capture their progress for social media and Kiwis will also be able to follow their progress via a diary on the The Rock website.
‘‘I feel like The Rock listeners will absorb it all and take our word for it,’’ enthuses Heyde. ‘‘We’ve got nothing to hide, we’re just a couple of Rock announcers.’’
He admits it did take them a while to get the blessing of one man for the trip – Mediaworks’ chief executive Michael Anderson.
‘‘That included him producing a 50-page health and safety document. He said, ‘why don’t we do more stuff like giveaway CDS instead?’.’’